Over the past few years the need for a collaborative computing environment has received increasing attention. Especially in science and engineering, people are finding they can no longer work alone on their problems. At times it is appropriate to share a single running instance of an application. Many significant problems, both in leading edge science and commercial production, have run times measured in days, even on the fastest computers. It is increasingly necessary to share data and to consult with one's colleagues, often from different disciplines. Since people prefer to use the tools which are already employed in their daily work, an important part of any sharing system is to allow maximal use of currently existing tools with which the user community is familiar.
The prior art of remote conferencing techniques includes three commercially available products. BBN's conferencing feature, which is named Slate, enables users at different workstations to share and confer over a Slate multimedia document. However, Slate requires conference systems installed on all participant workstations. In contrast, the method of the invention described below requires only the initiator having the supporting software and allows generalized sharing not limited to documents. HP's SharedX software product allows sharing of X protocol based applications between two or more users in a distributed computing environment using modified X servers. SharedX mainly runs under HP/UX 300, 400, 600, and 800. The functionality of SharedX is tied to HP/UX operating system functions and is not portable. There is no support in SharedX in the areas of access control or public/private windows.
Aspects, created by Group Technologies Inc., allows participants to work on a shared document. It cannot be used to share control over application programs and only runs on Apple Macintosh computers.
The prior ad does not reveal methods which allow sharing of program output and control across processors without modification of the processor's internal operating system or use of special libraries or authorized program interfaces (API's). None of the prior art techniques is portable to all platforms. The invention described below makes collaborative computing among a plurality of processors possible without requiring existing software modification.